Power Play Read online

  “And have we the correct ingredient for youthfulness?”

  Johnny looked at the list sideways and smirked. “Cat whiskers? Who was the joker who made this list out anyway? No, mate, cat whiskers are no good to anybody but the beastie that wears ’em most of the time. The way I figure it, your informant felt something sticky and figured it must be cat’s whiskers without checkin’ his source. What they use for prolonging youth and health up north is coo-berry thorns. And I’ll tell you the secret to that for free. You got to get the protected ones, in the middle of the patch, to get the best results.”

  “Thank you,” Zing Chi said with a bow, extending his hand and pointing the object in it at Johnny. “What you see in my hand, and in the hands of my workers, is a laser harvester, which is capable of flaying a man as easily as a tree. With the use of these implements, we will gladly take your suggestions under advisement and procure the items you suggest in addition to those we seek. First, however, we require transportation to the sources of these things. This you will provide us while the county council, as you call them, stay here as the guests of my company.”

  19

  On the Pirate Jenny

  “We’ve stopped,” Bunny said, suddenly sitting up straight on the edge of her bunk. She’d been leaning against the bulkhead and watching Diego write down the lyrics of the patter song. Some of the words Diego was transcribing, like “Major General,” were new words to her, but it helped to watch him put them down. She could sound out the syllables, as he’d been teaching her to do, and then later, when they were allowed out to walk the corridors—Louchard’s latest relaxation of the Rules of their Incarceration—he would teach her the proper pronunciation. Sometimes words didn’t sound the way they looked, which only made the chore of reading them harder. She had complained bitterly that words should look like they sounded.

  “Whaddya mean, we’ve stopped?” Diego demanded, laying his hand, palm flat, against the metal wall. “I still feel vibrations.”

  “Yeah, but they’ve changed,” Bunny said.

  “Yeah, and how much spaceflight have you done?”

  “Enough!”

  “Children,” Marmion said, in her most reasonable, let-us-not-quibble-over-trivia, tone.

  She’d had to use a lot of that lately as the confinement became less and less bearable. Even learning The Pirates of Penzance and the other Gilbert and Sullivan operettas that Namid knew was beginning to pall. At first it had been great fun, entertaining and engrossing. Marmion had a lovely light soprano voice and had been cast as Mabel, while contralto Yana had managed a creditable Ruth, Diego a decent Frederic, and Bunny, aided and abetted by Namid, became chorus and all the other parts. Bunny liked the piratical chorus best and was learning the part of the Pirate Captain—since he was an orphan, as she gleefully discovered at the end of the show. Between learning the lines and the lyrics, many an hour had been passed.

  “Look, Diego, you may have been brought up on a high-tech station,” Bunny said, ignoring Marmion’s attempt at pacification, “but you sure aren’t good at reading signs. I’ve had to, or I’d’ve been buried under avalanches and snow slides and all kinds of other hazards.”

  “All planetary!”

  “Well, a ship is like a small planet, isn’t it? And the vibrations have just altered! I was right about the air, wasn’t I? Why can’t I be right about the vibrations?”

  “She may be, you know,” Namid interposed with a wry grin. “The Jenny’s got speed in her, and it’s been three days since the air source altered. That’d be about the necessary travel time from Gal Three to Petaybee, wouldn’t it, Marmion?”

  “Yes, it would,” Marmion said, exhaling. This experience was unlike a boardroom brangle and as intense as any takeover or merge struggle, and she was finding her tolerance and understanding stretched to the limit. If it hadn’t been for Namid’s presence and diversionary tactics, she was sure there would have been fairly nasty squabbles, due simply to the pressures of so much proximity. Even with the most fiercely contested of her financial deals, she’d always been able to leave the premises and cool down. She was fond of Bunny and Diego; she genuinely liked Yana, who was bearing up nobly. She was more than a little fascinated by the complex personality of the astronomer, who had such divergent interests and informations: she’d never met anyone else so catholic in his tastes and so accomplished. Maybe she had dwelt too much in the rarefied atmosphere of her social sphere. One could become too specialized. Her time on Petaybee had opened that door, and this experience was showing her a vast panorama she hadn’t known existed—the panorama and pertinences of enforced idleness.

  Dinah O’Neill had managed to gain them more privileges: better food, the daily tour of the corridors as exercise. Putting their heads together one night, Marmion and Namid had discussed the size of the ship. He had been on the Jenny somewhat longer than they had, but he admitted that generally he was far more interested in things light-years distant than he was in his immediate surroundings. Still, he agreed that they must have been on a larger ship than the Jenny when they’d been marched into Louchard’s presence that first time. Bunny, who could describe the different types of snow to be found in a three-mile area with distinction and accuracy, was able to describe the seemingly identical corridors with the same eye for minutiae. The Jenny’s captain’s quarters, for instance, were adjacent to the crew’s quarters, separated only by one passageway, and the ups and downs suggested auxiliary corridors connecting the Jenny to a larger craft.

  “Deliberately confusing us as to the size and type of vessel,” Marmion had said.

  “Two ships then,” Namid said, scratching his whiskers.

  “Had to be,” Marmion agreed.

  Diego and Bunny had told the others about the first shuttle, the one that had originally attracted them to Cargo Bay 30, an escapade that had ended in kidnapping. The two had apologized profusely and with much self-castigation—and with the inevitable “ifs”: if they hadn’t been curious, if they hadn’t scivved off on their own, if they hadn’t put Marmion and Yana to the trouble of coming after them . . .

  That brought up the other question: What was Machiavelli Sendal-Archer-Klausewitch’s role in all this? Apart from being tagged as messenger boy for the piratical ransom demand.

  “Ples Ferrari-Emool might know more about him,” Marmion had said, “but I didn’t. He was the newly appointed CEO of a Rothschild’s subsidiary and would certainly have had an in-depth security check done on him to get to such a rank. I mean, how could he possibly have alerted the pirates that we were in Cargo Bay 30? What I’d very much like to know is where was Charas during all this?”

  “Charas?” Namid asked.

  “Never mind, Namid,” Marmion said, smiling and quickly changing the subject. “And why hasn’t Commander an Hon been able to track us? The security on Gal Three is supposed to be state-of-the-art!”

  Marmion had fretted over this factor many times already. Namid sighed quietly. “We’ll know when this is all over, my dear.” And he patted her nervous hands.

  His touch did soothe her, Marmion realized, even as she also accepted the fact that it was useless to review the events that had led to this impasse. It was better to think ahead, and practice meditation. Namid had offered a few new tips on quiet contemplation modes. They’d all learned them, both as a way of keeping sanity and a way to pass the heavy time of captivity and inaction.

  Had the time of inaction passed, Marmion wondered, if the ship’s vibrations had changed?

  “Well, the engines are still very definitely on,” Diego said, both his hands on the bulkhead. In fact, everyone had been attempting to assess the change.

  “We could be in orbit,” Yana said, and her hand went to the little pouch of Petaybean dirt.

  Bunny and Diego followed suit. Marmion had not been wearing the little pouch the day they were kidnapped, but she didn’t think the planet would care much what happened to her. She was responsible to and for herself.

  Bunny wa
tched Yana. Then she shrugged as the colonel did.

  “No change, huh?” Bunny asked with a wry grin.

  Yana shook her head. “It might not be Petaybee we’re orbiting.” There was an edge of depression and pessimism to her voice.

  “Where else?” Diego demanded stridently. “It’s the planet she wants to plunder, isn’t it?”

  “I had hoped she’d realized that there is no way to do that,” Yana said, again in that bitter tone.

  She’d been away from Sean over four weeks now—a whole month in the development of their child. She could feel the lump in her belly now, slightly protruding from what had been a flat, well-muscled plane. Physically she was feeling better than she had at the outset of her imprisonment, but the mental strain of uncertainty was beginning to mount—and the tension of being restricted. Not that long voyages on troop carriers hadn’t been restrictive, but this was restraint of a different nature, and one she bitterly resented. She tried not to give in to the stress, fearing that it might mar the fetus in some bizarre fashion. Many of her nightmares had taken the form of harm to the child who was born, or unborn, as some sort of a monster. She shuddered.

  Just then the panel opened and there was the second officer, not nearly as ferocious as Megenda, but almost as repellent in a slimy sort of way.

  “Time for walkies,” he said, and gestured brusquely for them to fall in and take the exercise offered.

  SpaceBase

  Adak was on duty at the SpaceBase cube. Simon Furey had painted a sign, which had been nailed above the entry:

  WELCOME TO PETAYBEE!

  PETAYBEAN IMMIGRATION AND INFORMATION!

  With the demise of PTS, the only spacecraft using the landing field—now flat, but somewhat pitted and broken—were from the Intergal Station. Mostly they were employed in lifting equipment off the planet. On the far side of the field the mounds of disembodied walls, floors, and roofs marked the graveyard of the old facilities, damaged when Petaybee had erected its ziggurat complaint against the Intergal despoliation. Adak and some of the other Kilcoole residents kept a sharp eye on this debris, most of which they could repair and put to good use once Intergal officials had cleared away and left them to the salvage.

  Adak could keep track of comings and goings from the station by the discreet tap Simon Furey had been able to sneak into the Intergal Comnet, so he knew when ships—with possible “invaders”—might be landing. That left him with a lot of free time to mooch around the piles, which suited him fine. Though there was enough of a snowcover to run the dogs through the woods, the river had only a thin crust of ice on it, not strong enough yet for the snocles to use as a road. The really heavy weather was still to settle in, but he sure hoped Intergal would settle out soon so they could get to work. With all the people coming in and nowhere to put them, they’d be right glad of any sort of shelter that could be cobbled together.

  A small vessel had just set down at the station, but Adak hadn’t seen any passengers emerge, just the crews loading up the sort of stores that wouldn’t be harmed by sitting out in the snow on the plascrete. Yet two people were now striding up to the door: a slim little woman with red hair, tufted with silver, lynxlike, above her ears and on her crown and lightly sprinkled with snowflakes, and a big guy who walked like a long-time spacer.

  “Hello?” Dinah O’Neill smiled her most ingenuous smile at the fur-clad, round-faced little man who peered at them in round-mouthed surprise. “Is this the right place to find out how to get to Tanana Bay?”

  “It’s the only place, and why would you want to be going to Tanana Bay? It’s snowing and we’ve had blizzard warnings,” the little man said. “But much as it pains me to admit it, I’m after bein’ the closest thing to a bureaucrat we got here ‘cept for the governor. Adak O’Connor, immigrations officer, more or less, at your service, ma’am. And what could I do for you, exactly?”

  “I believe I may have some relatives here in a place called Tanana Bay,” Dinah O’Neill said, and altered her smile to a sad expression. “I wanted to come and see if we really are related and if perhaps I could make a home here near them, as all my other family have died out and I’ve nowhere else to go.”

  “You really must be hard up to come to Petaybee then.”

  “Blood is thicker than water. Even frozen water,” she added, indicating the snowfall. Privately Dinah wondered how the hell the planet could afford state-of-the-art Nakatira Structural Cubes like this one if the planet’s economy was so marginal. Still, the old man’s response had been immediate and she didn’t think him guileful. One wanted to attract folks to a planet, not send ’em running. Or maybe they did, to keep all the wealth to themselves. “Actually, I wouldn’t have dreamed of coming here until just recently. I met a man who was telling me about how he’d been down with a committee investigating a so-ca1led sentient planet settled by a lot of the people relocated by Intergal in the time of the Reunification War in Ireland, where my people come from. In the course of his work, the man I talked to had met some people he thought resembled me who shared a similar surname. So, I decided to check it out.”

  “And how about you, sir?” Adak O’Connor turned to Megenda, who had been standing at bored ease behind Dinah throughout the conversation. “I take it you and the lady here are together? Would you have relatives here, too, then? Maybe some of them Andean folk on the southern continent?”

  Megenda cast a wild sideways look at Dinah, and she stepped in smoothly. “He’s an old family retainer. I can’t pay him any longer, but I couldn’t convince him to leave me. He’s very protective.”

  “That’s real good of you, sir, to look after the lady so,” Adak O’Connor said approvingly. Megenda nodded and glowered.

  “Now then,” Dinah said brightly. “Where can I get transport to Tanana Bay? Here?”

  “Here?” Adak O’Connor crowed a laugh, then sobered. “Well, here’s as good a place to hear the bad news as any. Right now, all the curlies are busy with them hunters that keep swarmin’ in like summer bite-hards. The dog teams are booked up for the next two weeks.”

  “What about shuttles? Surely . . .” She waved vaguely at the spaceport.

  “Dama, I don’t know where you come from, but there’s one copter available to this entire planet, and it’s borrowed and late returning from where it went to, and no other air transport at all since Intergal reclaimed all they had.”

  “Really? I’ve heard this planet is full of opportunities.”

  O’Connor snorted, shuffling papers around as if he knew what he was doing with things that had to be read.

  “Who was it exactly told you all this? Not that I mean to pry, Dama, but someone misled you proper.”

  Dinah waved vaguely. “I can’t recall his name. I was so excited about what he was saying. He said he’d been here with a Captain Fiske.”

  “Huh!” O’Connor’s eyebrows climbed in search of his receding hairline. “Captain Fiske ain’t exactly had Petaybee’s best interests at heart. You should be careful where you get your information, Dama. But just because Fiske’s a curly’s arse ain’t no reason you’re not welcome. You know anything about deep-sea fishin’?”

  “Not much,” Dinah admitted, “but I’m willing to learn.”

  Adak snorted again. “Little thing like you might have fast fingers and be good at gutting, but you’re a mite light for fishin’ work.”

  “Is that all that happens at Tanana Bay?”

  “Sure, ain’t much else up that way.”

  “Nevertheless, I’d like to go,” Dinah said. “Unless, of course, my information was wrong. Where could I get in touch with the town leaders and inquire about my relations?”

  “Short of Tanana Bay, nowhere.”

  “You’ve a comm unit . . .”

  “Oh, that one! That only tells me when there’s spacers comin’ in. Ain’t got no link to anywhere. Not even Kilcoole.”

  “Kilcoole?” Dinah paused. “That name sounds familiar.”

  “You could get to Kil
coole. Snocle’ll be back on its regular run soon. Got some mail and stuff for the governor.”

  “The governor?” Dinah asked as innocently as if she hadn’t been sending the man ransom demands for the past few days.

  “Yeah, Sean Shongili.” The little man seemed to swell his chest out with pride. “He’s even got a cube like this one.”

  “Oh?”

  “Had to,” Adak rattled on with a broad grin. “Yana’s cabin—she’s colonel now—was so chock-full of paperwork you could barely find Sean in the middle of it all.”

  “Really?”

  “Yup, and that O. O’Neill . . .” He peered at her a little too closely for comfort, but she couldn’t see how one man would know about the correspondence of everyone on the planet, immigrations officer or no. “I don’t suppose you’re an O’Neill, too, are you? Never met one before and now they’re comin’ out of the woodwork.”

  Dinah contained her start of surprise. She quite deliberately hadn’t given the little man her name.

  “O. O’Neill?” She could also look exceedingly blank.

  “Oscar O’Neill of the Nakatira Structural Cube Company?”

  “Never heard of him. Why did you say he was here?” And, Dinah thought to herself, was that how Nakatira Cubes got to backwater-poor Petaybee?

  “He brought in the five cubes that we got sent.”

  “You mean these cubes—they’re very expensive articles, in case you didn’t know—were just . . . bestowed on you?”

  “Sure were, ’cause we couldn’t afford ’em, being new at being an independent planet. Say, can you read and write?”

  “Yes,” Dinah said, adding mentally, Doesn’t everyone, just as she realized that this man could do neither.

  “Teacher?” Adak leaned forward eagerly. “We got one at Kilcoole—Wild Star Furey, and she’s doing the job a treat. Why, two of our kids already read theirselves right through the primer they were given four weeks ago.”